Allan keeps eight to 10 hives in his Saratoga orchard, has sold honey to shops in Campbell and Los Gatos and does bee removals all over the Bay Area.

Most of his removals take place in Campbell. He theorizes that this is because the homes are older and rarely insulated and the area is a "big gardening community."

"If you drive around Campbell, you'll see vegetables and fruit trees in the front yard," said Allan, 73. "You don't see that in Saratoga."

On May 24, he removed a nest from a rooftop wall above Ken Kawamoto's business, Kawamoto, Weil & Co., in downtown Campbell.

The nest had been in the wall for about three weeks, Allan said. After cutting open the stucco wall and exposing the nest, he collected the bees by using a low-speed vacuum connected to a wastebasket lined with mesh. He cut out the combs, placed them in removal frames and vacuumed up the remaining bees. He then relocated the combs into his orchard in Saratoga.

Allan opens bee nests from the inside: because the guard bees are circling in front of the nest, they don't notice Allan approaching. "Unless I stress out the girls that are inside, they won't send out any chemical warnings," he said, adding that he rarely wears protective gear. "I can work completely unprotected, typically."

When Allan opens a nest, the bees inside usually fret a little, he said.

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"Just like when you walk into the house with dirty feet, your mother goes, 'Wooo!' " he said. "That's exactly what they do."

While a single bee has no personality, colonies have distinct personalities: some are easygoing while others are easily angered, he said.

"You never know what to expect," he said. "You open up the wall with a little trepidation."

Allan can tell the mood of the bees by the noise and smell emanating from the nest. An angry grumbling isn't a good sign, he said. If the bees are ready to attack, the nest will reek like bananas. In that case, he advises, "If you have the ability to leave, do so!"

Allan does most of his removals in the spring and summer when the bees are most active. He explained that a nest is a location chosen by bees while a hive is a box kept by a beekeeper.

He avoids disturbing the bees he keeps in his orchard during the fall and winter months, when they are stressed by the lack of nectar. In the spring, bees are "exuberant, joyful and nothing bothers them" because they have access to a steady flow of nectar, he said.

"In the fall, I've got to fight the bees to take out the honey. In the spring, they're like, 'Go ahead,' " he said.

According to Allan, bees should only be removed from their natural habitat if they are at "people level" in places that humans frequent.

"For the most part, I tend to discourage bee removal if they're not being annoying," he said.

The recent rooftop removal was "good maintenance," he said. If the nest had continued to expand, it could have led to a mess of honey within the walls that the company would have had to get rid of. Allan recommended that Kawamoto seal the hole with insulation; bees will still smell the old nest but won't have space to rebuild, he said.

Allan got into beekeeping after buying a house in Saratoga that used to have an orchard. He planted new trees that had "wonderful blossoms but no fruit" for two years. "When they took out the orchard, the took out all the bees because they were in the old trees," he said. "I thought I'd better fix that."

Six weeks after getting his first batch of bees, an incident at his work--ISS, a disc drive company--catapulted him into his first bee removal job: a spool of cables was filled with bees and no one wanted to go near it.

"Everybody knew I had just gotten bees. So it was decided who would fix the problem," he said with a big laugh. "I didn't know what the hell I was doing."

After that, more people asked him to do removals.

In the late 1980s, California bees were struck by two types of mites. (Varroa, a parasitic mite, is still the beekeeper's biggest problem, Allan says.) For years, bees continued to die out and the number of bee removal calls dropped drastically, he said.

In 2000, bees made a resurgence and the number of bee removal calls picked up again. In 2005 and 2006, Allan and a fellow bee enthusiast would do one or two removals per week.

When the recession struck, many people realized they could make money doing removals. "Now there's a lot of guys willing to do bee removals," he said.

However, Allan does fewer removals these days. "My wife looks at me and says, 'Do you know how old you are?' " he said.

Ed De Soto has sold Allan's honey at the Olive Bar in downtown Campbell for the past year. Allan has also sold honey to the Butter Paddle in Los Gatos.